Championing Cooperation Among NGOs: Our Partnership with AmeriCares

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We have been championing cooperation among NGOs for some time in Haiti; it is a necessity to work with Haitian communities and other NGOs to make lasting change in Haiti. Cooperation has been built into our work in Haiti from the beginning. For every chlorinator we have installed, we coordinated with the involved Haitian community, DINEPA, and often with other NGOs. We then took this model of cooperation to our Cholera Prevention Consortium last year, in which International Action and 35 different groups disbursed chlorine to over 400,000 Haitians.

With our de-worming campaign, we continue our commitment to cooperation. We have begun our greatest single de-worming program yet by partnering with one of our main allies in the Cholera Prevention Consortium, AmeriCares.

AmeriCares and International Action will lead an albendazole distribution campaign at fourteen different clinics and hospitals. The program will improve the lives of 90,000 children. A dose of albendazole kills intestinal worms. A dose of albendazole ensures that worms will not infect the child for four months. Three doses a year improves a child’s nutrition (intestinal worms eat up to 20% of a child’s caloric intake) and increases the chance the child will attend school (in Haiti, diarrhea is the main reason children miss school).

Our Work with AmeriCares

AmeriCares and International Action have been working together on three fronts:

  1. The distribution of granular chlorine to help communities protect themselves from the still spreading cholera epidemic
  2. The start of a recycling initiative that aims to:
    • Clean up the streets of Port-au-Prince, reducing the morbidity of intestinal worms
    • Provide sustainable income to many different community members
    • Enable communities to purchase the chlorine they need for their neighborhood chlorinators, with locally earned money – the water site would now be self-sustained
  3. A de-worming program that will provide protection from intestinal worms
Hospitals and clinics participating in the International Action-AmeriCares de-worming program
Partners Albendazole doses
to be administered
Cap Haitian Health Network 90,000
Hopital Eben-Ezer 10,000
Klinik Sen Franswa 7,000
HHF 25,000
ASAD 5,000
GHESKIO 12,000
Daugther  of Wisdom 25,000
St Boniface 50,000
NPFS 5,000
HAS 40,000
Izai Jeanty 2,000
FHED 2,000
Hopital Espoir 2,000
Total 275,000